When it comes to hunting homes and seeking realtors, most of the people head online. As real estate related searches are increasing day by day, realtors can’t miss out on this crucial traffic. According to real estate digital marketing statistics, 84% of all home buyers found online information, an incredible part of their home search. Thus, SEO is becoming more important than ever for professionals in real estate. However, SEO for real estate is tough but the rewards are huge. Let’s understand SEO (search engine optimization) in a simple way. There are basically two types of SEO: one is on-page in which we can do work ON our website. The other is off-page in which we can do everything directly OFF our website. In this post, we’ll be specifically looking at the top 10 off-page optimization tips on real estate that you can implement to build your brand and generate leads online. But, before listing them down, I want you to know about the term off-page optimization.
Off-page Optimization
Off-page optimization is a technique to get quality links from web pages that are not of your domain. The more the number of authoritative sites that links to you, the more the possibility is that you’ll be getting higher visibility on Google’s database.
Blogging
Blogging gives you an opportunity to establish yourself as a pro and reliable voice in real estate industry. But writing blogs can be an overwhelming task of your real estate marketing plan if you’re a first time agent or a veteran. However, once you know the content types that the buyers or sellers like, it’ll become much easier for you.
You need to follow some simple basics for a blog. Set a blog on the website and at the same time do some guest blogging on the relevant sites related to your niche. While keeping buyer personas in mind, always make your blog informative, list based, and eye-catching. This will seek the attention of readers, which as a result will improve the traffic to your site. Hence, resulting in closing deals too.
Create a blog around frequently asked questions. This is also one of the best ways to engage with your audience and convert them into your customers.
Local Business Listing
Local business listing is referred to as a medium for online profile creation. It includes your business name, contact number, and other necessary details. There are many websites and directories that let local business owners create free business listings. Sites such as Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, Superpages, etc. provide a backlink from the profile section which in turns improves brand exposure and traffic. To know more on how to improve your brand exposure, please read: Top 7 digital marketing ideas for brand promotion
Social Media
As mentioned before, people are researching extensively on digital channels. Therefore, to nurture a relationship with them, a realtor needs to be active on social media. This is of the great essence if you want to convert your visitors into customers.
Be it Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, every social media platform is witnessing success with billion active users. Pinterest and Instagram can be very useful platforms for realtors to post photos and videos. So find out the place where your target clients like to hang out the most. This way, you can expand your network online by spreading their reach to friends and family of clients. This enables trust and word of mouth marketing.
Social media plays a crucial role in your off-page optimization efforts. But if you’re not able to harness the power of such an incredible platform then like to recommend you to read the free beginners guide to social media on Moz.com.
Video Marketing
When people research online for homes, they often look for variety in the content formats.This can be infographics, blogs, images, VIDEOS, etc.
According to a Kissmetrics report, more than 80% viewers are inclined to buy after watching the product video. So always try to produce an informational, data driven, and community focused video in order to gain the customer loyalty.
Video marketing is a very cost effective strategy in contrary to other television commercials. And through video marketing, you can easily reach out to your prospects. And YouTube is a world’s largest video site or a ready made platform that you must incorporate in your real estate off-page strategy. You can even earn money from YouTube channel promotion. Isn’t it great!
Tip: A nice video that showcases your product and effectively communicates would be really provocative and memorable one.
Article Submission
Although it’s a slower process, writing articles and submitting them to popular article sites such as Ezine, Go Articles, Buzzle, etc will enable you to get some deep links for your website. This is certainly an old technique, but trust me it still works and helps you get quality links.
Directory Submission
There are many directories for realtors such as Zillow, Trulia, RedFin, etc. These are highly trafficked real estate sites. So it’s really good to get listed in them. These are the platforms where you can do marketing and networking without spending a single penny.
Moreover, there is a classified section to post ads. In short, it’s a true win-win situation for real estate agents who are looking to reach their audience extensively.
Mobile Internet Marketing
The population of mobile internet users is increasing, so if you reach that specific part of a population that use smartphones or tablets and are easily accessible on the go. For this reason, I recommend you to invest in a responsive website which includes mobile content. Also, Google Maps is a very prominent tool with which realtors can target their local audience on desktop and mobile.
Forum Marketing
You can easily find a lot of real estate forums, just type real estate with a particular location on Google and hit enter and you’ll be surprised by the results. When you join a forum, just do these simple things:
- Complete your bio
- Reply to threads
- Answer people’s queries
- Write blogs on commonly asked questions, and share it to help your audience.
If you want to embed a link to your site within your signature then try to use Do-Follow Forums.
Don’t forget to share your blogs and forum postings on social media profiles. With it, you’ll build followers there resulting in expansion of your networking and marketing opportunities.
Schema Markup
The schema has a specific markup terms for organizations and businesses. And it is used on realtors website to make them rank easily on SERP’s. A page marked with schema data allows search engines instantly know about the subject of the page.
However, there are several ways to markup a site. But due to a large number of agencies operating worldwide, the best way to markup a site would be with an extension of schema such as itemscope.
Pay Per Click Advertising
If none of the off-page optimization tactics mentioned above work, opt for pay per click advertising and do a thorough research on your targeted keywords. Remember, you’ve to pay to be the first choice of your targeted audience, but that’ worth it. Because if you manage to appear on the top of organic search results with a link directing towards advertisers portal.
In a real estate market, developers must use this technique to influence their potential customer purchase that leads to targeted traffic on their website.
Conclusion
So these are only a few of the off-page optimization tips and techniques on real estate. You can also mix and match these strategies according to your suitability. I’m sure you may have better strategies, then why not share with us here.
Related: Top 10 on-page digital marketing tips for real estate
You can also leave your questions and views below. I would love to hear from you!